XHTML Adoption Rates?

So I was in London last week, and I stopped by Waterstone's to browse. They had some XHTML books remaindered and I realized: I haven't seen anything about XHTML in years, not even remaindered books (of course, I haven't been looking for it either).

Is anyone using XHTML?

For that matter, what about XPointer or XLink?

8 Comments

bazzargh
2004-03-30 08:55:14

Yep.
We finally made the switch when management wanted a site available in more than one language; managing the translation work without xml originals was pretty much impossible.

As part of the change we also took time to get rid of any non-semantic markup (this helps reduce the amount of tag noise the translator ended up seeing). The resulting pages are half the size they used to be, and look & work better.

terrie
2004-03-30 09:01:00

Oh my...
I'm guessing (hoping) that XHTML is just flying under the radar here, which might be the case since once you work with it, it's easy to think of it simply as well-formed HTML.

That said, it's not necessarily easy to accomplish. We try to code to XHTML as much as possible on O'Reilly sites, but there's a host of difficulties in doing so that I won't go into here...but it's definitely something on our minds.

jseller
2004-03-30 09:39:33

all over it
Using XHTML, XFORMS, XFRAME, and XML Events as generic UI markup for all browsers, be them Desktop(IE,Moz,Opera,Lynx) PDA(PC,RIM,PALM), Phone (HDML,WAP,CHTML) or Voice. This then gets adapted and serialized to the target. Makes things almost easy, especially maintainance. It will even work with the multi model browsers (whatever that ends up looking like...)

jwenting
2004-03-30 22:44:00

been using it for a while now
Don't use all the features, but I've been coding all my HTML to XHTML specs since about 2001 whereever possible (kinda hard to do when depending on an appserver that generates HTML 3.2 of course which I was stuck with for a while).

I think XHTML needs a 'killer app' - a must-have 'commercial' reason to make the switch, for most organisations to take notice.

BobDuCharme
2004-03-31 06:24:32

XHTML and XHTML books
Perhaps you should ask a different question: when people are making the transition from HTML 2.0 to XHTML, do they really need to spend money on a book to explain to them how to do it? I wouldn't consider the remainder status of XHTML books to be a direct indicator of XHTML's lack of success. Google's index has over 600,000 files with an extension of ".xhtml"; imagine how many more XHTML files are out there with extensions of ".xml" or ".html".

XPointer and XLink are two more questions, and much more complicated. I wrote something about the lack of XLink's success two years ago at http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/03/13/xlink.html and things haven't changed much, and I've written something about a recent xml-dev thread on the subject that I'll be putting on my weblog within a day or so.

Bob

jackungerleider
2004-03-31 07:41:12

XHTML and Plone 2
I've recently switched to working with the Plone 2 CMS. The core templating for Plone is all XHTML. These sites won't present pages to google as .xhtml either.

Jack

afr
2004-04-13 15:33:03

WCM + XML Forms + Rich Text
The Web Content Management (WCM) industry is adopting XHTML very heavily, as it is MUCH better for processing with XSLT etc. All of the big CM guys (Interwoven, Vignette, Documentum, FileNet, Stellent) use it to a greater or lesser degree. So may be XHTML adoption is more of a back-end thing?

Also an interesting area is the use of XHTML for rich text in more generic XML content types. For example, in Microsoft InfoPath you can create a sales report and your rich text fields are all capturing information as XHTML.

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